Ten minutes

Our ten-minute free-write is back for another round! Tap away on whatever comes to mind, no filters attached.

Does not seem like a whole lot of time…so I’m guessing we won’t see any epic poems or Declarations of Independence. Hell, we probably won’t see more than the dull echo of no-particular-idea resonating around inside hollow skull. (No, don’t go back to edit, idjit!)

So lets see what pours out of the Freudian twitch factory this morning.

Let’s talk about SMFU’s. Particularly easy to notice, the closer we get to Thanksgiving, is the Slow-Moving Family Unit. You’ll see them, trundling through the grocery, in enormous-large groups, multiple-shopping-cart retail encounters.

The thing is, the SMFU is too large to be efficient. Hell, two shoppers is often inefficient, particularly if they’re the Cellphone Shopper sub-species. But those big family groups…you’re talking hours to work their way through a single grocery trip, and finally wheeze into Checkout like worn-out marathon runners.

No wonder they always seem so crazy grumpy!

No cart can move faster than the slowest-walking individual. The entire group cannot proceed to the next shopping aisle until the all of the bored kids have been re-roped at re-attached to the SMFU. The baby never, ever stops screaming at maximum volume. The Man of the Group (there’s always at least one) cannot stop making useless, distracting suggestions (“did we want any chicken gizzards?”). And the more members you include in the SMFU, the longer it takes this entity to function in any vitally important decision-making capacity (like which lunch meat to purchase).